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Retargeting is such a powerful advertising tactic that you’ve probably already experienced it multiple times today. You’re scrolling through Instagram, and you see an ad for the jacket you put in your Target.com shopping cart yesterday. Or, you open up Facebook in your desktop browser, and at the top of the page there’s an ad for the pajamas you considered buying last month. Sound familiar?
For most websites, only 2% of traffic convert on the first visit. Retargeting allows advertisers to reconnect with the 98% that don't convert the first time. Here’s how it works:
So, how do media buyers make retargeting magic on Facebook and Instagram? Luckily, Facebook and Instagram are owned by the same people, so media buyers can use Facebook Ads Manager to run ads on both platforms.
The first step to retargeting on Facebook and Instagram is to add the Facebook Pixel to your website. The Facebook Pixel is a small piece of code that tracks the people who visit your site and the actions they take there.
Once the pixel is set, you're ready to identify your retargeting audience segments. Click the “Audiences” tab in Facebook Ads Manager to get started. Under “Create a Custom Audience,” you can choose either website or customer database retargeting. Website retargeting uses the Facebook pixel, while customer database retargeting requires the media buyer to upload a list from their CRM.
It’s best practice to create multiple audience segments that will be targeted for different periods of time. This way, you can test which audience segments are most responsive.
Now that your audience segments are set, you can start creating your campaign. You’ll need to set the conversion action you want to optimize for, as well as your budget.
Finally, you’ll upload your creative assets. Since you’re retargeting consumers who already know about your brand, you can skip straight to advertising your product or service. Learn more about how to create effective retargeting ads here.
Once your campaign is live, it’s important to monitor it closely. Keep track of how the campaign is performing, and reallocate budget from your worst-performing ad combinations towards your better-performing ad combinations.
Interested in learning more about retargeting? Check out our post on ROI for retargeting ads, or find out more about retargeting advertising with Basis here.
When it comes to running an eCommerce business, there is a veritable wealth of relevant data you can use to improve performance and drive increased sales. Across the plethora of marketing and advertising channels, there are myriad metrics you can follow that expose which campaigns and initiatives are creating value and which are falling short.
If you want to ensure you’re getting all the most relevant insights to optimize your eCommerce marketing initiatives, here are 13 components you need as part of your marketing dashboard:
An eCommerce dashboard is a summary of all the marketing and business data that is most important to you. Instead of making you dig into pages and pages of reports, a dashboard allows you to get a snapshot overview of performance and track weekly, monthly, or quarterly trends.
When you use a Marketing Intelligence Platform (MIP) to centralize and analyze all your business data, it can help you build a dashboard of key performance reports that you can use to make optimization decisions. A dashboard can help you understand how your sales and marketing initiatives are performing overall.
The best thing about dashboards is that they’re customizable. Using widgets, you can add in all your own reports and track the metrics that are most important to your business. You can start with a template then add and remove widgets as needed. If you’re just getting started, here are some important dashboard components to include to make eCommerce management easy:
Every eCommerce dashboard needs an overview of key sales metrics that marketers can see at a glance, such as:
As an informed eCommerce marketer using dashboard analytics, you’ll have a good idea of what your AOV is any day of the week. So when you notice any major changes in performance, you know there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Having these key sales metrics at your fingertips can help you always ensure your marketing and sales initiatives are on track for success.
Cart abandonment rates average around 76% for eCommerce sellers, leaving huge opportunities for improvement. You should always pay close attention to changes in your eCommerce store’s cart abandonment rate because they could be indicative of an underlying problem. There are a variety of potential factors that can cause people to leave without finishing their purchase, such as high shipping costs, slow shipping speed, long checkout process, and bad site user experience. Including your ongoing cart abandonment rate as a dashboard component can help you monitor and find ways to improve it.
Average Conversion Rate is an important metric to monitor as it can tell you a lot about how your overall marketing performance helps drive sales for your eCommerce business. With this dashboard component, you can compare your current conversion rate to the previous period or year. You can also break down your conversion rate across different traffic channels to compare and determine which are the most valuable for your business. If you find a particular channel has a much lower conversion rate than others, you could start initiatives to improve your marketing and user experience for this particular audience.
Key traffic metrics like total users and traffic sources should also be at the top of your eCommerce dashboard report. While total users won’t tell you much about the performance of your marketing campaigns, it does show you how many opportunities you have to drive a conversion. Traffic sources also give you a great overview of the potential value of different marketing channels, such as direct, organic search, referral, and paid ads.
As an eCommerce marketer, it’s important to know which products are your top sellers. Having an overview of your top 10 best-performing products as a dashboard component can help you monitor this at a glance. With this dashboard component, you can easily see how many sales you’ve made in the current period for particular products, how performance has changed over time, your total revenue from each product, and how it’s increased or decreased over time.
General demand changes, seasonality, and other factors can impact which products drive the most revenue over time. Paying attention to this report helps you discover changes you can make to your paid marketing initiatives to push products that will return the most profitable margin.
When you use an eCommerce dashboard that integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can get reports of your top organic keywords and their performance right from your dashboard. At a glance, you’ll be able to see what your top keywords are and your average position, as well as clicks, impressions, and CTR for each.
This is a valuable overview of your organic SEO performance but also can show opportunities to broaden your reach with PPC ads. For example, if keywords related to your top-performing products aren’t ranking well in organic search, you can target them through PPC to get more visibility for your best products.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is another important component to have on your eCommerce marketing dashboard, especially if you’re investing in paid traffic through Facebook Ads or Google Ads.
Here’s how CPA is calculated:
(Total cost of paid traffic) / (Total sales from paid traffic) = Cost Per Acquisition
This metric is of course readily available to you through Google Ads and Facebook Analytics. However using your dashboard, you can see a combined metric that reflects how your paid ads are performing overall across platforms. Having this metric available at a glance on your dashboard alongside other components can also help you identify and address potential factors that could impact your CPA.
Not all site visitors are going to convert into paying customers the first time they visit, which is why Cost Per Lead is an important metric to track. Cost Per Lead helps you understand how effective your marketing campaigns are at generating leads for your business, based on how much budget you spent on the campaign. This metric is particularly valuable for eCommerce businesses that sell more expensive items, where lead nurturing is a key aspect of driving conversions.
End Action Rate is a measure of the last thing your audience members do as part of a marketing campaign. This dashboard component can include a graph illustrating what percentage of audience members take different actions, such as leaving your site, bounce, social engagement, purchase, or contact requests.
End Action Rate helps you understand how effective your campaigns are at driving key goals like engagement, lead generation, or sales.
Return on Investment (ROI) is a key metric eCommerce marketers need to make better growth decisions. ROI lets you understand how your time and money invested in marketing campaigns contribute to driving revenue and business growth.
ROI refers to your financial investment in a particular marketing campaign and new revenue generated by that campaign to calculate the metric. Say you spent $10,000 on an advertising campaign in a month, and during that time your sales grew by $15,000. Here’s what you’d end up with:
ROI = [($10,000 - $5,000) / $5,000)] x 100 = 50% ROI
ROI can tell you if a campaign is worthwhile to continue investing in, and can help marketers discover if their optimization tactics improve their bottom line.
Sales by marketing channel is an important metric for understanding which platforms and strategies are most effective at generating sales. Including this as a component in your eCommerce dashboard helps you easily see how paid ads, organic traffic, email marketing, and other channels drive revenue.
This can reveal opportunities to better allocate your marketing investment and drive more eCommerce sales through digital marketing.
Most eCommerce marketers put too much focus on finding new customers and overlook nurturing existing ones. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a measurement of how much revenue you can expect to earn from a single customer. Paying attention to CLV can help you focus on optimizing the entire customer journey, not just the path to first purchase. Monitoring changes to CLV can also inform you of how your retention efforts are performing so you can take steps to reduce churn.
New vs returning customers is another valuable metric that illustrates how your retention efforts are doing. Since it’s cheaper and easier to convert an existing customer than to complete a sale with a brand new customer, returning customers offer a huge opportunity to increase your ROI. Using your email campaigns, you can engage and upsell your existing customers, and monitor the effectiveness of these efforts with the new vs returning customers metric.
Even as a seasoned marketer, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of relevant performance data to work with. An eCommerce dashboard is the solution marketers need to summarize important reports and track performance at a glance. Dashboard component widgets allow you to customize your reports to focus on the metrics that matter most to your unique business. Start out with the components mentioned in this post to build your dashboard, then add in new variables over time to optimize it.
When Verdin Marketing signed on to Basis in 2019, they were hoping for three business-level benefits:
On-board Basis and take advantage of workflow tools, the built-in DSP, and access to emerging digital media vehicles.
Basis enables Verdin Marketing to stay on the cutting edge of media through education and access.
Education: The Basis Technologies Media Innovations Team keeps the buyers up-to-date on new media types, landscape shifts, and emerging media.
Access: The Verdin buyers can now access innovative inventory and media types such as CTV on Roku, Audio on Spotify, and native ad units.
Verdin’s clients have access to Basis’s portfolio of over 1200 evergreen PMPs. These private marketplace deals unlock premium inventory and targeting.
For Verdin, using Basis isn’t about saving hours—it’s about bringing more value to their clients with the same budgets. Basis gives Verdin the tools and options needed to make those budgets work harder.
Since launch, Basis put powerful tools in the hands of the Verdin Marketing team. The team makes quick, hands-on optimizations in the DSP, regularly tests new partners and audiences, and quickly pulls granular reporting.
The team also now has access to many more media options for their clients—interesting audiences, direct opportunities, social channels—and the reporting to prove success, all without spending more money.
With Basis, Verdin has first-party proof points about the effectiveness of digital media allowing them to shift budget to digital and capture more revenue.
Using the Basis Universal Pixel, Verdin is also building proprietary audiences to share between non-competitive clients.
With the additional control and media opportunities Basis provides, Verdin was able to increase CTR for their largest client by 23% and provide a 140% increase in site traffic without increase budgets.
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TV and digital have battled over share of budget for the past decade. What if, instead of weighing their pros and cons, marketers discovered how these tactics can succeed together? Even more, what if the increased fragmentation of TV could be improved via automation?
In this month's webinar, Centro's Derek Newman and WideOrbit's Frederick Lee share how marketers can win by leveraging TV and digital together.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time-consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
Two-Thirds of Global CMOs To Boost Spend and Scale-Up Tech in 2021 [:02]
A new report from the CMO Council finds that 65% of CMOs are planning to boost spending through 2021, with a heavy investment in marketing technology. Over 70% of marketers are turning to automation to improve efficiency and work more effectively.
Apple Says IDFA Changes Will Go Live ‘In Early Spring’ [:03]
Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that in early Spring the company will start requiring apps and advertisers to get permission before they can use the IDFA for tracking and ad targeting. Apple claims “unlimited personal data” is not necessary to provide a good digital experience and says this move will give app users control over how their data is handled.
What the F**k Is FLoC? Google Opens Up on Post-Cookie Roadmap [:03]
Google has opened up on its new approach to delivering and measuring ads sent to Chrome users once it finally lays the tired third-party cookie to rest. The incoming scheme has been the subject of much fear and speculation due to its market-shaking potential. The Drum explores what we can expect from FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts).
Google Claims FLoCs Can Be Nearly As Effective As Cookie-Based Ads [:05]
Google’s Chrome browser is making its case for interest-based cohorts—or FLoCs (aka, federated learning of cohorts) —available for public developer testing starting in March. On Monday, Google shared the latest results of its own experiments with the FLoC API. Google says its simulations demonstrate that cohorts can drive around 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared with cookie-based advertising.
The Future of Video Gaming is Bright—Even As Real Experiences Return [:04]
Globally, the video game industry was one of the best equipped to handle the turbulence of 2020. Not only did engagement skyrocket as consumers stayed at home, but the industry pivoted to ensure it was doing everything it could to keep consumers engaged. Branded crossover events, virtual concerts, and celebrity influencer participations all fueled a groundswell that shows no signs of receding—even as the COVID-19 vaccine promises to allow people to be together again IRL.
Who's On First? Why Mobile Increasingly Isn't My 'Second Screen' [:03]
Every new medium gets on base by comparing itself to the most established and valuable medium, and for most of the last century, that's been the television screen. So it shouldn't have been surprising that mobile screens—both hand-held smartphones and tablets—would be characterized as the "second screen" relative to TV. But increasingly, it's actually the primary one.
Inside Big Tech’s Podcasting Goldrush [:08]
This year, 38% of marketers are planning to boost podcast spend. That will drive one in every five digital audio ad dollars toward podcasts in 2021, equating to over $1bn. The major tech players, from Spotify to Apple, are making big moves with increased investments to develop and acquire quality content, ramp up distribution, increase scale, and offer innovative advertising solutions.
How ‘Horizontality’ Is Driving M&A in Ad Tech [:02]
Speaking at Adweek’s Outlook 2021 event, Terry Kawaja, CEO of investment bank Luma Partners, said ad tech will see continued investment activity around CTV, data & identity, mobile app, and audio as companies look to strengthen their positions and expand their core competencies.
The path to programmatic may seem daunting, but don't worry—we broke it down for you.
When it comes to programmatic buying, there are typically four different options: Outsourced Managed Services, buying self-service via a tech-based platform, starting on a path-to-self-service, or getting left behind! Don't be the latter—let someone guide you with outsourced Managed Services or gain full control with a digital buying platform. Otherwise, take the time you need to adjust and identify current and future needs, and start on a path-to-self-service.
How do you know which path is right for your team and business? Read our Programmatic Readiness Guide as you assess the ideal solution for your digital buying needs, to help you find out.
In recent years, many advertisers have considered bringing programmatic media buying in-house. For others, a lack of infrastructure and support make it difficult to take the plunge.
In this episode, Centro's EVP of Media Services and Operations shares the different ways advertisers can approach in-housing, as well as how to best prepare beforehand. Finally, she shares how advertising professionals can enhance their careers in today’s crowded and fast-evolving media environment.
As marketers - and media buyers, in particular - a lot of money flows through our digital hands. Depending on company size and program ambition, it can be a daunting amount. The larger the budget, the greater the impact even the smallest mistakes can make.
This is where reporting and budget pacing comes in, playing an absolutely critical role in ensuring you avoid any spend disasters and stay on course to meet performance targets. In this article, we explore the extensive improvements you can make to your program and day-to-day processes by monitoring pacing effectively, and, more importantly, how you can do it.
Budget pacing dashboards are arguably the most valuable that can be made. Understanding precisely how much you’re going to spend is equally as important as knowing how much has been spent. The manner in which you can expose such insights can be done in myriad ways, but the most straightforward (and therefore most common) is a linear calculation. It’s simply total spend, divided by days passed thus far in the period you’re reviewing, multiplied by the number of days remaining. Exposing this in visual form is an ideal way to learn if you’re on the mark, or if adjustments are required. If you’re managing multiple budgets, it’s easy to break these out by duplicating charts and filtering for the various accounts/campaign categories that you have.
In the chart below, spend and forecast are showcased together in one column. It’s an essential visualization that quickly reveals how much you’ve spent, how much you’re forecasted to outlay, and where that forecast sits in comparison to your budget. It’s a simple graph, but it conveys a lot of information instantaneously.
An alternative way to look at this would be via a running total. The line graph here provides an indication of how much you’ve spent, how you’re trending against your target budget cap, and whether there have been any major spend swings - or surprises - day-by-day in the budgeting cycle to date.
Aside from uncovering the progression and direction of spend, it’s also vitally important that marketers know where their investments have gone. There are a couple of visuals to help with this that can additionally double-up in functionality and help expose any issues that need to be resolved.
The first is a simple pie chart that shows the overall percentage of spend coming from the main advertising channels, for which search is dominant. However, while this succeeds perfectly in telling a good story about where the money is going, there could be lurking issues that will go undetected due to the volume of data usually in play. A suspicious spike in spend on a single day, for example, may not necessarily be displayed clearly here as it becomes lost in the overall percentages.
For that reason, I also like to show the total spend across the given time period. As this chart is intended to look for immediate issues, it’s focused on just a short time period. These are stacked line graphs, which will clearly show peaks and troughs that may warrant further investigation.
Both of these visualizations can, and should, be duplicated for the major areas of spend. Device, network, advertising channel, and publisher are all good starting points. If you’re running display or RLSA campaigns, an audience, or even demographic, set of charts would also be valuable to have on hand.
With the how and the where covered, I also like to have straightforward lists showing the top spending campaigns. It’s useful to understand what generally eats up most of the budget and it can be easily monitored for any outliers. I like to have, as a starting point, Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Keywords.
The intent with all of these graphs is to help peel the covers off what’s going on with your campaigns; exposing the details and following the pennies and where they go. It’s incredibly easy for any campaign to have some measure of wasted spend, but these charts will help to identify and resolve some of them.
Not only do they help to understand where money goes, but they also help to monitor for issues. Any large swings in spend will be easily caught and remedied by simply having the right dashboard in place.
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Our universal reporting and analytics technology is instrumental in driving consistent growth for marketing teams large and small. See for yourself how powerful it can be.
The typical person can be exposed to more than 4,000 advertisements each day. Not surprising, given that people around the world spend an average of 170 minutes online per day! There are so many opportunities for advertisements to cross their screens.
If an advertisement catches your eye and it’s a product or service that you are interested in, there’s a good chance that it's part of that brand’s digital campaign strategy. This is where a media buyer comes in—it's their responsibility to strategically plan and place advertisements online to drive specific results for brands.
In digital media, there are two main parts to a media buyer’s job—media planning and media buying.
Media planning includes:
Media buying includes:
Brands and agencies rely on media buyers to ensure that their online advertising dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. Media buyers are also instrumental in tying online advertising dollars back to business objectives. This often includes increasing brand awareness, driving online sales, increasing site engagement, and more.
There are many tools available to help media buyers streamline day-to-day processes. At Centro, we are fortunate to have Basis—our own comprehensive & automated digital media platform that allows our team to run direct, programmatic, search, and social media buys through a single interface. This platform is the foundation of our company and has enabled us to service over 1,000 media teams throughout the years.
Some of Basis’ features include:
So as people continue to spend more time online and see thousands of ads each day, know that media buyers are behind the scenes, carefully crafting digital campaigns to place a lot of those advertisements. Hopefully these media buyers are using platforms like Basis to make their jobs easier and ensure advertisements are put in front of the right people, at the right time, and the right place!